John Brown, Abolitionist
1800 - 1859
5th Cousin, six times removed
A Note About the John Brown Mural, above, in the Kansas Statehouse.
In June 1937 John Steuart Curry, a famous Kansas artist from Jefferson County, was commissioned to paint murals in the Kansas Statehouse. In 1928, Curry had received national fame with the purchase of his painting "Baptism in Kansas" by the wealthy patron and New York art museum owner Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Curry met Grant Wood of Iowa and Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. These three artists became life-long friends and by the 1930s established a new style of art known as Regionalism. Products of their early defining work remain with us today as major icons of American art. Curry's "Baptism in Kansas" in 1928, Benton's "Boomtown" in 1928, and especially Wood's "American Gothic" in 1930, all seem to capture the unique experience of American rural life. Before Curry finished the second-floor murals in the Kansas Statehouse in 1942, he received excessive criticism from legislators and refused to sign and complete all the murals that he had planned.
John Brown was a man of action -- a man who would not be deterred from his mission of abolishing slavery. On October 16, 1859, he led 21 men on a raid of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. His plan to arm slaves with the weapons he and his men seized from the arsenal was thwarted, however, by local farmers, militiamen and Marines led by Robert E. Lee, then a Union Army officer. Within 36 hours of the attack, most of Brown's men had been killed or captured. (All of this material on John Brown, except Note about the mural, is from WGBH/PBS online Resource Bank.)
John Brown was born into a deeply religious family in Torrington, Connecticut, in 1800. Led by a father who was vehemently opposed to slavery, the family moved to northern Ohio when John was five, to a district that would become known for its antislavery views. During his first fifty years, Brown moved about the country, settling in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York, and taking along his ever-growing family. (He would father twenty children.) He never was financially successful but his lack of funds did not keep him from supporting causes he believed in. He helped finance anti-slavery publications and gave land to fugitive slaves. He and his wife agreed to raise a black youth as one of their own. He also participated in the Underground Railroad.
In 1847 Frederick Douglass met Brown for the first time in Springfield, Massachusetts. Of the meeting Douglass stated that, "though a white gentleman, [Brown] is in sympathy a black man, and as deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery." It was at this meeting that Brown first outlined his plan to Douglass to lead a war to free slaves. Brown moved to the black community of North Elba, New York, in 1849.
Despite his contributions to the antislavery cause, Brown did not emerge as a figure of major significance until 1855 after he followed five of his sons to the Kansas territory. There, he became the leader of antislavery guerillas and fought a proslavery attack against the antislavery town of Lawrence. The following year, in retribution for another attack, Brown went to a proslavery settlement near Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas and brutally killed five of its settlers. Brown and his sons would continue to fight in the territory and in Missouri for the rest of the year.
Fervent abolitionist John Brown raises his right hand as if taking an oath in the earliest known portrait of him. This daguerreotype was made in 1846 or 1847 by an African American photographer named Augustus Washington, the son of a former slave who operated a daguerrean studio in Hartford, Connecticut. Both Brown and Washington were deeply committed to ending slavery.
Brown returned to the east and began to plan for a war in Virginia against slavery. He sought money to fund an "army" he would lead. On October 16, 1859, he and 21 other men -- 5 blacks and 16 whites -- raided the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. He and his men were quickly surrounded by the combined forces of local militias and a detachment of United States Marines led by then-Union officers Robert E. Lee and J. E. B. Stuart. After a thirty-six-hour shoot-out, Brown and his surviving men surrendered.
Brown was wounded and quickly captured, and moved to Charlestown, Virginia, where he was tried in state court and convicted of conspiracy, inciting insurrection and treason against the state. Before hearing his sentence, Brown was allowed make an address to the court.
“. . . I believe to have interfered as I have done . . . in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it be deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children, and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit: so let it be done."
John Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859. In 1858, U.S. Senate candidate Abraham Lincoln had sought a compromise solution that would contain slavery in the hopes that it would eventually expire. John Brown shattered this illusion. With his death, Brown became an instant martyr for millions. His daring raid radicalized many Northern opponents of slavery while intensifying pro-secession sentiments in the South, just as the 1860 presidential campaign was set to begin. Lincoln disavowed Brown as a madman while pursuing his successful bid for the White House. However, Brown’s parting words --“The sins of this guilty land can only be purged with blood” – would prove to be a prophetic curse.
Bissell 3G Generation
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Joyce, Meredith, George, Gwen, Roger, Arthur, Eleanor, Chip, Carolyn, Betsy, Clyde
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Adelaide Lyon Boutelle --- Richard Meredith Bissell
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Mertie Ella Bisbee --- Herbert Hunt Bissell
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Julie Ann Richardson --- John Hatch Bissell
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Mercy Ann Searle --- Benoni Bliss Bissell
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John Brown Tirzah Pierce --- Solomon Bissell
b. 1800 d. 1859 ]
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Owen Brown --- Ruth Mills Eunice Olcott --- Noah Bissell
b. 1771 b. 1771 ]
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Hannah Owen --- John Brown Benoni Olcott --- Deborah Cooley
b. 1740 b. 1728 ]
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Hannah Higley --- Elijah Owen Joseph Cooley --- Mary Dorchester
b. 1717 b. 1706 ]
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Brewster Higley --- Esther Holcomb Joseph Cooley --- Mary Griswold
B. 1680 b. 1684 ]
[ ]
Mary Bliss --- Nathaniel Holcomb George Griswold --- Mary Holcomb
b. 1651 b. 1648 b. 1633 b. 1636
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[-------------------------------- Thomas Holcomb --- Elizabeth ------------------------------------]
b. 1610 b. 1617